Very, Very Curious (Evangelical Swimming Pool Edition)
Something weird happened on Twitter yesterday. Someone who shall remain unnamed riffed some speculation about a more than six month old Buzzfeed article. As is the nature of Twitter and impulsive social media, the speculation caught fire as purported fact and it was as though some dramatic new revelation had unfolded even though there was no actual news at all. This is sort of in the nature of social media non-facts. But without getting into the fullness of that speculation, I wanted to focus your attention on some facts from articles from earlier this year that do warrant some more attention. It has to do with Michael Cohen, Jerry Falwell Jr, Falwell’s wife and a 21 year old pool boy the family decided to go into business with.

Let’s go all the way back to August 2017 when Politico published this fun and lurid story about a South Beach flop house (ahem, youth hostel) which rather surprisingly was co-owned by the family of Jerry Falwell, Jr. Falwell staked the money to set it up but technically the family’s ownership stake was in the name of Falwell’s wife and son. It’s a seedy flop house in a down-and-out part of town where young overnighters sleep on metal bunks, put their valuables in lockers and share common bathrooms. There’s a lot that goes on there that you wouldn’t associate with the Falwell family – unless you’re in a snarky mood.

Okay, so far so good. Weird. But the world is weird.

Then in May of this year Aram Roston added some intriguing new details to the story in a piece for Buzzfeed. Roston got a hold of a lawsuit which made a series of allegations about how the Falwell family got involved in this business with a then-21 year old pool boy named Giancarlo Granda.

I’m going to excerpt a few paragraphs from the piece and highlight some portions that caught my attention and those of others.

The suit, which has not been previously reported, was brought by a father and son who claim that after they helped conceive of the business, the pool attendant and Falwell wrongly cut them out of it. The suit says that while Falwell Jr. and his wife were guests at the Fontainebleau Miami Beach in 2012, they developed a “friendly relationship” with the pool attendant, Giancarlo Granda; flew Granda in a private jet; and eventually backed him in a business venture, setting up a hostel that offers low-cost dorm-style nightly accommodations to visitors. The pool attendant, according to public records databases, was 21 when he met the Falwells.

…

A representative for Falwell Jr. and his family emailed BuzzFeed News that Granda was “offered a share” in the Alton Hostel venture because he lived in Miami and would act as a manager. Granda, Falwell’s wife, and Falwell’s son are partners in the company that owned the hostel. Falwell Jr. loaned the company the down payment to purchase the $4.65 million property but was not a partner in the venture, said the representative, who asked not to be identified. He added that Granda had flown only once in a private plane the Falwells had rented.

…

This is the venture at the center of the lawsuit against Falwell Jr. The suit — which was filed in 2015, dismissed, then refiled in 2017 — alleges that after Falwell Jr. and his wife met Granda in 2012 at the hotel pool, the evangelical “indicated that he wanted to help Granda establish a new career and build a business.”

Two affidavits attached to the lawsuit quote real estate agents who say that Falwell Jr. said “he was looking to purchase a business in order to provide a source of income to Giancarlo Granda.”

Now, it’s fair to say that there’s a lot of delicate innuendo here. And Roston, rightly, seems to have been quite aware of the subtext. But something seems to have been going on here. Falwell meets this 21 year old, develops a “friendly relationship” and suddenly he’s flying him on a plane and founding a business so the guy can have a regular income? That’s odd. But in the absence of any other information, it’s hard to know quite what’s up.

But then Michael Cohen comes into the picture.

According to Roston, it was Cohen who engineered Falwell’s critical endorsement of Trump in January 2016. Now, Cohen has a profile in the New York City real estate world. He’s kind of connected in the New York City media world. And he’s had business interests in South Florida. But how he connects up with the Falwell family or evangelical politics is really not at all clear, to put it mildly.

Here are some more paragraphs …

Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen, who is now facing a federal criminal investigation, helped arrange Falwell Jr.’s endorsement of Trump in January 2016, BuzzFeed News has learned.

The relationship between Cohen and Falwell Jr. has not been previously reported, but the two have been acquainted since 2012, according to a source with direct knowledge of Falwell’s decision to endorse Trump. The source, a high-ranking official at Liberty University, said that Falwell Jr. occasionally visited Cohen’s office in New York City but that there was no business relationship between the two men.

According to a separate source with knowledge of Trump’s campaign, Cohen was so confident in Falwell Jr.’s support that he and Trump assured others, even before Trump announced his candidacy, that Falwell Jr. would issue an endorsement.

…

It was Michael Cohen who reached out to Falwell Jr. to urge him to actually endorse Trump during that visit, according to the source familiar with Falwell’s decision. He reached out to Falwell Jr. again after the visit to remind him he had agreed to endorse Trump, the source wrote in an email to BuzzFeed News.

Remember that Michael Cohen swooped in when Elliott Broidy, the top Trump supporter and money man, suddenly had a former mistress threatening to go public with the fact that she was pregnant with his child. Somehow Cohen connected up with the lawyer who had also represented Stormy Daniels in her original hush agreement and they put together a deal to keep everything quiet. (Did I mention that Granda was brought up to Virginia and met Trump when Trump gave a speech at Falwell’s Liberty University in 2012? Yep, Roston got that too. Cohen was also there. Go figure.)

Cohen’s job was to make problems go away for Trump, to make women stay silent. He seems to have also provided these services on what we might call a freelance basis, showing up out of the blue when very wealthy and prominent people were looking at reputation-shattering revelations.

How did he know about these things? Was it from Stormy Daniels’ former lawyer? Was it from his friends at The National Enquirer? Falwell’s relationship with Giancarlo Granda seems very odd and out of the blue. Cohen seems to have come into the picture at around the same time. And he seems to have been a key player, maybe the key player securing Falwell’s endorsement of now-President Trump. And that makes no sense at all.